Your Customer is Mobile — Are You?

There's no question about it, the world has changed. It's gone mobile. Consumers are free from the confines of their homes, offices, and traditional media and retail environments. Today's consumers have the power at their fingertips to fulfill their needs anytime and anywhere, and they're using it.

To understand the impact that mobile is having on marketing, it's important that you consider the integral themes driving mobile forward. In the last few years, we've seen unprecedented releases of new hardware and software technology; the rise and influence of social media; the introduction of personal cloud computing; new innovations in business models; continued rollout of globalization; jockeying between the central controllers of mobile connectivity, the mobile carriers and new players like Google, Yahoo, Comcast and Microsoft; the introduction of new industry guidelines and principles; new government regulation; and new investment flows within every part of the mobile marketing ecosystem, just to name a few.

All of these themes and many more make up the mobile story. However, there's one theme that overshadows them all: the dramatic shift in consumer behavior.

In our mobile world, consumers are connected and empowered. This hasn't always been the case. Less than eight years ago, there were no more than 1 billion mobile connections worldwide. Today, nearly 90 percent of the global population, over 6.8 billion people, live within reach of a mobile signal. There are over 5.3 billion mobile connections.

Of these 5.3 billion connections, there are 3.75 billion unique mobile users, with the difference between total connections and unique users showing us that people carry multiple devices — and they use them. They're consuming media, searching, identifying, locating and acquiring whatever they need (e.g., information, goods and services) right from the palm of their hands. Consider the following: